I’m currently collecting data for a July – September 2020 newsagency sales benchmark study. While the process is in its early days, with data from 30 businesses in so far, already I am seeing concerning data for stationery with sales down, against an overall trend for the businesses.
I have data for one business where overall revenue is up 13% while stationery revenue is down 9%. In another case I can see revenue up 9% but stationery revenue down 12%.
While stationery has been challenged in the channel for a few years, these results are worse than the trend. It’s concerning.
I have to say this is a relief to read. My total sales are up but stationery is down. 13% for me. My range is good. I’m regional in a town of 11,000. I’m not worried because so much else is doing well. But the stationery decline has me wondering about whether to trim what I have. There was a small increase when people were working from home but that was early this year.
Maybe you can put it down to COVID and lack of work participation.
Other areas are up in retail in general as well however work related purchases are not.
Officeworks’ sales are up, they must have taken newesagency’s market share.
We have been struggling with this category for some time and having been searching for our niche. The decline is in mainly old world business stationery associated with improvement and take up in technology. Jagg is right Officeworks and other online stationery suppliers are also winning market share. We are also noticing a number of boutique retailers and gift stores who seem to be offering fashion stationery. Luckily for us we found some support in this reporting period with art and craft. Having said that whilst our overall revenue for the period was up over 20 per cent, our stationery sales declined by 1.2 per cent.
If they sell to businesses then sales could be affected. Filing products were above average last quarter but regular business consumables like pens and markers were down. Supply issues are also a problem, if you don’t have it then you can’t sell it. It can be seen with even the big boys, out of stock or simply not carrying as many lines.
Another factor is very little demand for fundraising or show supplies products, due to COVID making events be cancelled. Cardboard is well down due to this and raffle tickets.
Whole I’m most appreciative of the effort taken in providing this information. I need some explanation on what percentages you are using. I assume it is simply % change on departments but to better compare the dept changes need to expressed as a percent of the total or indexed. For example the % a dept is of total revenue of the base period and the % change. Over a year a modernising newsagency has probably decreased the size of the stationery department and increased say the toy dept which will cause a skew simply because they’ve removed slow lines from stationery which did add to last years sales but have been replaced by a different dept better selling product this year.
Simple % change is useful for quick analysis and highlighting something that needs to be investigated further for an individual business, as shown in the article, but some sort of base needs to be provided to allow comparison of what can be very different businesses even if in similiar settings.
It could be a good thing for some businesses if stationery sales are down and other dept up if they’ve been changing product mix.
PJ, % changes are as per all similar representations I post. For stationery it is % change in revenue year on year on a same store basis.
In this post I am only looking at stationery. see my broader benchmark results posts for movement across departments.